We vote because there’s something about society we want to see re-engineered.

'Suppose I phone the police,” says Marion. “What do you think would happen then?”

Let me tell you about our friend Marion. She lives on her own in a seaside town and works as a hospital nurse. She is quietly proud of the home she’s made for herself in her one-bedroom flat, which looks over a communal garden and permits oblique sea views. She doesn’t want much from life: to feel the ocean spray as she takes her evening walk; to discharge her duties well; to be at peace in her home. She has an entirely normal and well-ordered existence. Her experience of life is the main reason the Conservatives might not win the next election.

Marion has no life partner, true. But she’s never metaphorically alone: she has a quiet faith. And she’s never literally alone: because she lives in a flat – with an upstairs neighbour who is slowly destroying her peace of mind.

If the exaggerated cries of sexual ecstasy he and his partner share with the rest of the building are just one of those things flat-dwellers must tolerate, then the noisy, thudding dance music which keeps Marion awake night after night is not.

In vain she has invoked the freehold lease, which forbids music after midnight. She phones and knocks on the neighbour’s door: she is not answered. She contacts the council, which has a “noise abatement service”: they tell her to keep a diary.

She phones us in London, and the cumulative despair of those sleepless nights makes her weep. We do our best with practical words: we will go with her to talk to the neighbour, we will be on her side when she interacts with the council bureaucracy; but none of this is what Marion really needs. Those needs are twofold: to hope that matters will improve, and for such a hope to be realistic. But this would require the agents of society – the council, the other neighbours, the police (whom she is scared to contact, lest anti-social disturbance escalates to something more frightening) – to be unequivocally on her side. Marion, like most good people, has learned not to make that assumption.

I’m sure there’s “a law” which could help Marion, but that’s not the point. The point is how scared she feels in negotiating a part of life that once would have been resolved by simple social interaction. She is suffering because we replaced the organic ties that bound a community with a set of poorly understood, massively over-interpreted, legalistic “rights”; rights which have encouraged, almost institutionalised, anti-social behaviour. I am Marion when I’m on the bus, and I’m frightened to tell children to stop misbehaving. You are Marion when you don’t tell a feckless pedestrian to pick up their litter. We used to know “the rules”: that, for example, you could speak to a neighbour about noise, without fearing that your life would be rendered unbearable for ever after. We are all frightened of the over-reaction of people who are not behaving as good adults should, and it leaves us at their mercy. We ordered the institutions of civil society to stop judging behaviour, and then we wonder at the chaos to which good people are abandoned.

That there was a hope of resetting those rules was the best reason to deprive Labour of office. Failure to address Marion’s plight is the biggest political danger facing Mr Cameron. It sounds ridiculous to say “It’s not the economy, stupid”, when the economic outlook is so grim, but I’ve never believed the reductionist argument which says we cast our vote primarily for economic reasons. We vote because there’s something about society we want to see re-engineered.

Conservatives feel let down, not because the deficit is being tackled, but because too much in society feels the same as it did before the election. They understand that Mr Cameron requires Lib Dem votes to retain his anti-Labour majority, and that being politically shackled to the decaying Lib Dem corpse prevents the introduction, in this parliament, of proper Tory measures – such as tackling the Human Rights Act.

But the lack of a Tory majority should not mean a lack of Tory language, or the flexing of Tory institutional will. Lib Dems may claim that it’s either impossible to tell the difference between right and wrong, or, if it is possible, that only a judge on a bench is able to make the distinction; the Prime Minister should ignore them. If that makes Lib Dems uncomfortable, so be it; many of us have had enough of the liberal society which throws the Marions of this world to the wolves.

While we wait for the Tory majority required for legislative change, Tory language could change the terms of the debate; in fact, the latter will help deliver the former. I suspect the Prime Minister is aware of this – Ed Miliband, in his clumsy speech at his conference, gave the impression this week of having woken up to the issue. Right and Left may not matter so much in the post-Cold War world. Right and Wrong do.